The exact opposite of this has been done. One (successful) artist would set down a largish square (6' if I remember rightly), and fill it with silicone to capture all the loose items within, and make a cast of the surface, then painstakingly reproduce the surface to look like the original, complete with garbage, loose stones, etc. And then, of course, hang in on the wall. Really quite interesting.

Then again, there's that woman who takes casts of the insides of rooms, and presents those as art. Most effective one was for a Holocaust memorial.

Dr Curry: I don't know if this is who you meant, but British artists the Boyle Family have made a career out of carefully reproducing 6 foot square areas of wasteland, streets, quarries, etc. Some of their works are astonishingly realistic.

// I don't get it. How is this a clock? //
and // Thanks phundug, I thought I was the only one who didn't get it. Oh, yeah it's a clock because... no that's not right. //

I give up - I can't see any clock reference in the idea. Why are [phundug] and [Robert C] talking about clocks? please explain as this is driving me crazy thinking I must be missing something or being excluded from an 'in' joke - I hate that!

Thanks [k_sra]. I checked out his page - it's crammed full of ideas but I couldn't detect an overwhelming preponderance of clock-related issues - do I take it that clockological pursuits are something of a hobby for the good farmer?

Capp Street Project in San
Francisco had an installation a few
years ago in the gallery (while they
were on Second Street) where
someone (maybe the artist alluded
to above, don't know) reproduced
exactly the street immediately
outside the street level gallery, and
installed it, wall to wall, a few feet
off the ground, right up to the
windows. You could stand outside
on the sidewalk and line up the
details inch for inch. Just like a
chunk of street was shifted 30 feet
left, and 3 feet up. I imagined
some inconceivable being got
drunk one night while messing
around with the cut and paste in
their Photoshop program (Reality
3D version) and forgot to hit the
delete button.

I wonder what sort of colors would be appropriate for the inverted guts of a pothole? Garish, Peter Max type colors leap to mind but might pull the creation too far from its pothole provenance. Perhaps a bicolor spraypaint intended to highlight textural aspects?